Gravity
by dharmamonkey
Summary: Brennan reflects on Booth's killing of Pelant, and what it means to them both. Oneshot tag to "Sense in the Sacrifice" (9x4).


**Gravity**

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**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** _I don't own Bones. I am, however, interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply._

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I could see it in his eyes.

It wasn't sadness, or anxiety, or even anger. Those emotions would all have been perfectly understandable given the circumstances, but as I looked into his eyes as we stood there next to the examination table in the atrium of Modular Bone Storage (known to Booth and the staff more colloquially as "Limbo"), I knew it wasn't any of those emotions, all of which I'd learned to read in his face and in those deep brown eyes of his over the course of the nine years since I first met him.

I'd seen this same expression—his heavy brow sloped low over his shimmering, dilated eyes making them seem even darker and more deeply-set than they normally were, a slight tension in his jaw that caused the masseter and temporalis muscles to pulse around the temporomandibular joint right in front of his ears—on his handsome, rugged face once before.

I saw it the morning after we first made love—the morning after my intern, Vincent Nigel-Murray, was murdered by Jacob Broadsky. I saw it in his eyes as he stood in front of his bathroom mirror shaving, pausing between strokes of the razor to stare into his own eyes, his lower jaw shifting forward as I imagined him giving himself some kind of inspirational self-talk, and I saw it about a half-hour later when he dropped me off at the lab. He pulled up along the curb in the Jeffersonian garage, threw the Tahoe into park and leaned over the center console as we just looked at each other. A few hours before, our lives had changed completely when seven years of narrowing social distances between us collapsed into virtually nothing as our bodies came together in love. His mouth fell open as he reached for my face, and I'd expected him to say something—since Booth is the kind of man who always knows the right thing to say under every circumstance (something I envy him for)—but instead, he simply stroked his big, callus-roughened thumb over the edge of my cheek and closed his mouth without a word, rolling his lips together and pressing them into a firm line as he gave me a silent, solemn nod.

It was an expression I can only describe as one of gravity.

My heart was still racing even after Booth turned off the laser-like green lights and proved that the silver and black, plastic and aluminum device planted by Pelant was nothing more than a toy. It was with a certain breathlessness in my voice that I told him what Pelant had told me about an at-large serial killer that only he could help us catch.

"You know what?" he told me. "I think we're gettin' close. Pelant knows it and he's afraid..." Booth punctuated his statement with a small, almost imperceptible nod. I saw his strategic mind working, grinding and crackling behind those chocolate brown eyes of his, and I felt strangely comforted by that.

"Because you're gonna kill him," I said, the statement falling from my lips abruptly and without my usual premeditation.

That's when his expression suddenly shifted: his facial muscles seemingly froze for a moment as he stared back at me, his eyes wider and yet darker as his pupils dilated in response to my words, and for several seconds, it appeared as if he'd even stopped breathing as he gazed back at me, his expression stony and his eyes as still as glass.

Then, without saying a word, he bent over, set the fake plastic grenade-shaped bomb on the floor, then lifted his leg and crushed it beneath his foot, much the way a groom at a Jewish wedding breaks a glass at the end of the nuptial ceremony. As the strange decoy broke into a dozen pieces with a harmless _crunch_, he looked back up at me. His eyes were hard, his nostrils flared and his temple pulsed with involuntary muscular tics as he held my gaze for a couple of seconds, then turned away and walked out of the room.

He knew what he felt he had to do, but somehow, when I gave that thing, that task, a name, he drew a dark curtain over his blank, frozen, curiously empty expression and I realized I must have violated some kind of heretofore-unknown taboo by naming what it was he was preparing to do. There was a latent gravity about this kind of killing—the premeditated and deliberate taking of a human life, even if eminently justifiable—that I knew weighed especially heavily on him.

I hated seeing that look in his eyes, and knew then, in that very moment, that if Booth had to kill Pelant, even though he had all the justification in the world and would be both legally and morally absolved of culpability for killing him, it would still weigh on him. He would still feel tainted by it. It's a sacrifice he's made many dozens of times before, and one he stood ready to make again—for me, for Christine, and for all of us.

Years earlier, he told me, _"It's never just the one person who dies, Bones. Never. Never. You know, we all die a little bit, Bones. With each shot, we all die a little bit."_ Of course, he was right. I could see it, even before he left to track down Pelant, by the look in his eyes as he walked out of Limbo. And I felt it that night, as we lay in our bed after making love, when I stroked my finger down from his suprasternal notch, over his sternum and between his pectoral muscles, dragging my fingertip over his sweat-slick skin. I felt him recoil ever so slightly from my touch, the involuntary movement so faint I would have supposed it was a shiver had I not known what deed he had been forced to do that night, and the gravity that weighed down on him in its wake.

The knowledge of it—that he had sacrificed a little of himself for me, for our daughter, and for countless people who would never even know how they'd benefitted from his willingness to give up some of his own humanity for their sakes—made me love him even more.

It was with that in mind that I turned my head from where it rested against his shoulder and pressed a kiss to his collarbone, just an inch above the starburst-shaped scar on his upper chest. He'd willingly sacrificed everything for me, and I knew that there was nothing, nothing, that I wouldn't do for him. I murmured my love into his warm brown skin as he hugged me closer and kissed the top of my head, and so it was that, cradled in his embrace and weighed down with love, admiration, and the perfect daze that followed so naturally on the heels of sexual satisfaction at the end of an exhausting day, I drifted off to sleep.

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**A/N: **_I'm sure there will be a zillion post-"Sacrifice" stories. This one is mine. Of all the scenes in that episode, it was the scene between B&B in Limbo that clung most tightly to my thoughts._

_I know it wasn't much but I hope you liked it anyway._

_**Special Note to Dharmasera readers:** The newest chapter of our crossover story "Hand to Hand" (9th in the series) is up. Go, read! Right now!_


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